Montreal: French or English school?

Comments From Our Readers

Rani writes:

Hello there,

I have been reading your books since just before I moved to France in 2008 with my husband, who grew up with parents from France in Canada, thus a completely bilingual Canadian. Your book about France (60 Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong) was my go-to for any time I really needed a refresher on why things were the way they were. And it’s because of your book, I went from being an unsure, skeptical immigrant, to a francophile.

We have just moved back to Canada and have made Montreal our home. I have been looking into schools for our children, and stumbled upon your site when I was looking for “English” versus French school systems. If I was confused about which school to send my kids to before we moved here, the Quebec system has put me in confusion overdrive. What a difficult decision. Because I am from Vancouver and was schooled there, I have the option to send our kids to English school. So there’s that. However, I am a little clueless on whether a French school has enough English to get my kids bilingual, since we speak French at home.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I look forward to future reads from you both. And to thank you for keeping me logical and open-hearted in France.

Julie answers:

Thanks so much for the kind comments about Sixty Million. Most couples I know who BOTH speak English at home decide to send their children to school in the French system. The reason is that they want their kids to be able to function perfectly (or as close as possible) in French. From what I’ve seen, kids in the French system don’t get much English at all. It seems to be a few classes a week that teach some basic English. But English-speaking parents aren’t really worried about how much English their kids get at school, because the home environment reinforces their English so much that their kids are perfectly fluent in English, and can read in English.

Our case is slightly different. Since we are a bilingual couple and live in a French neighbourhood, and since we have mostly French-speaking friends, our girls naturally took to French. So we opted to send them to the English school system to make sure they would become fluent, and be able to read and write properly in English. Since our local English school, Nesbitt, is located in a French-speaking neighbourhood, it has lot of native French-speaking teachers and the French instruction is really strong.

In our case, it’s the best of both worlds. If only we didn’t have the dark cloud of a possible school closure hanging over us….

Suddenly Home EIGHT: Beginning of the Day Rituals (or why it's so important to put off going to work a little every day...)

In my decades listening to friends talk about their jobs, I’ve noticed people like to get to work as quickly as possible.

Morning commutes aren’t joy rides, I get that. But what people who work outside the home might not realize – that is, until they join the home office tribe – is that it's not all bad. Going to work gives them time to get used to the idea of … going to work.

People who travel to work have a buffer zone before getting into performance mode: they get to wake up, eat breakfast, drink coffee, shower, get dressed, commune with their kids (or pets) and then walk, bike, drive or bus to their destination. It’s a great excuse to listen to the radio, or read or listen to podcasts or just think about other things.

For us home workers, little of this applies. When you skip the transport and personal preparation part, which is not essential most days, we have a pretty skimpy morning routine and no built in time for a bit of day dreaming.

I never thought that was fair. Call it a self-designed buffer zone, or creatively putting off the inevitable, as a self-employed person, I have always thought I deserved to ease into the day just like everyone else.

Since I have still have children at home, the first chunk of my morning is boilerplate: I wake the kids up, make sure they eat, give them an excuse to roll their eyes at someone who asks stupid questions.

But when my girls are on the sidewalk heading to school, I do not head straight to the office. I am usually in the living room reading my assortment of newspapers.

Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I have created some kind of morning ritual that combines coffee, newsprint and sweat. Many mornings I do a Pilates workout while listening to the news. In different times and places, I have gone on a regular morning walk, or even a ski in nearby Parc Maisonneuve.

This means getting up earlier than required by the 40-hour week, but it’s worth it. Being able to switch out a commute for morning exercise is probably the greatest advantage of working at home.

Whatever you feel like doing, I’d recommend some kind of pre-work ritual to anyone who works at home. You might not be doing this forever, but it’s probably not going to be over soon. Being in automatic pilot for the first hour or so of the day helps you feel normal and ignore the eternal question of whether you really want to work at all. (In my case, it also lets the creative juices start flowing.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love my work and I usually wake up with ideas and projects. But that doesn’t mean I always feel like executing them. I wouldn’t go as far to claim a morning routine make you a better worker. It just helps you get to work without wondering if you really want to be there.

In my last post (Keeping the Kids at a Distance) I mentioned how my husband and I have learned to give our daughters the run the house during our work hours.

We just ignore the collateral damage until the end of the day. It’s the only way to keep our parenting duties (all but the essential ones) from dragging us away from work.

In an earlier post I also explained why you have to stake out physical territory to keep your concentration.

You need to protect your professional mindset as well.

In my experience, any activity related to cleaning or organizing household items is a direct threat to work. Sound paradoxical? Cleaning up craft supplies, filling the dishwasher and folding laundry seem like useful activities to squeeze into work hours, but they’re not. When you are trying to work, they are distractions.

If you don’t put housework off until you leave the office, it will suck the life out of your workday.

It might be the hardest thing to ignore, but everyone working at home has to resist the siren call of the kitchen sink. I might be hardcore, but I also avoid filling the dishwasher.

If you are new at the home office, you have seen just how fast the pile grows when you cook three meals at home. For those of working with kids at home, this has become to be infinitely harder. Because even when kids or teenagers occupy themselves during the day, they eat.

Still, even though the stack of dishes has reached a new scale, from Monday to Friday, we let it grow until we clock out of the office. Same goes for everything else lying around the house. When I see open paperback novels, pens, erasers, markers, USB keys and phone chargers littering my living space, I just move on until I get “home from work.”

One trick I have for avoiding the housework trap is to make sure whatever else I do during the day has a beginning and an end. Like a walk. Or a cup of coffee. We all know housework is a bottomless well. Starting chores in the middle of the day is like jumping down the rabbit hole with a rag and a bottle of bleach.

If I’m not making coffee, eating lunch or catering to another essential need, I try to leave the premises for a break. Yes, that was easier a month ago when it was still legal to step off our front porch. But even quick walk around the block is better than sliding down the slippery slope of housework.

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